Worst Performance Engine of All TIme

Drewsifer wrote: Any chevy small block. Horrible nasty engines. You can do anything you want to em, good luck getting more than 200 hp out of one of those pieces of scrap! Seriously what the heck chevy.

Maybe I'm missing the joke?

Lot's of 'interesting' comments, but I don't see anything intrinsically bad about industrial use. Lamborgini made his fortune with farm equipment before leveraging that expertise to make cars. The Coventry-Climax engines were designed to run firefighting water pumps. Ferrari fell in love with the sound of the V-12 truck motors during WWII. Superchargers and turbochargers have their roots in industrial applications. 'High performance' is always a matter of context. In the greater scheme of things, a purpose designed and built sports car motor is by far the exception. Nearly all of them are derivations of the bread-and-butter sedans and econobox motors.

funny enough.. the Rover/buick engine bolts into the stag with just a couple of adaptors... it fits in the chassis beautifully.

I also agree on the ford based saab engines...

Bobzilla wrote:

Drewsifer wrote: Any chevy small block. Horrible nasty engines. You can do anything you want to em, good luck getting more than 200 hp out of one of those pieces of scrap! Seriously what the heck chevy.

Maybe I'm missing the joke?

Yeah those crappy SBCs just suck.

http://www.ryanscarpage.50megs.com/combos1.html

There are over 100 SBC combos on that site and few of them make less than 300hp. A lot of them are over 400hp and several are over 500hp. All with no boost and (gasp) carbs. The only thing right in the original post is "You can do anything you want to em"

Adrian_Thompson wrote: Triumph Stag 2.5L V8, utter total POS rushed into production to compete with the Rover (ex-Buick) V8.

What would you expect from two TR7 engines siamezed together (in theory anyway)?

Once again I cast my vote for the wunnerful aluminum Vega engine. What a total POS. It disappeared from the face of the earth in a couple of years to be replaced by...the "Iron Duke four".

spitfirebill wrote: Once again I cast my vote for the wunnerful aluminum Vega engine. What a total POS. It disappeared from the face of the earth in a couple of years to be replaced by...the "Iron Duke four".

The Iron Duke was used in Pontiac's IMSA GTU Fieros, running against RX7s, et al:

The funny thing is that the iron duke was the first thing to pop into my head upon reading the thread title.

jamscal wrote: Wasn't one of the 924 engines (block maybe) from AMC?

Other way around. Audi built the engines for the 924 and the AMC's.

Oh, and those late eighties Pontiac OHC engines were total garbage! I had a Passat that had a healthy appetite for coolant hoses (PO had driven it a long time with a sticky thermostat, so it ran hotter than normal and made the hoses a bit squishy). On THREE different occasions, I smelled anti-freeze while driving it and thought "berkeley! Not again!", then I looked up and realized I was driving behind a Pontiac Sunbird. They would blow head gaskets if you looked at them wrong.

M030 wrote: It was EC back when they were good (1996). They eventually got 150hp out of the 924 engine with a hotter cam, ported head and side draft Webers. The intake manifold was the 'bottleneck' and it was the side draft carbs that freed up the hp. All that being said, I agree, the 924 2.0 engine sucked.

Porsche purposely hamstrung the cylinder head design to keep it slower than the 911's of the time. This has been verified by an engineer that worked on the project. A good cylinder head port and polish will wake it right up, improving the intake and exhaust from there helps even more.

16vCorey wrote: The funny thing is that the iron duke was the first thing to pop into my head upon reading the thread title.

jamscal wrote: Wasn't one of the 924 engines (block maybe) from AMC?

Other way around. Audi built the engines for the 924 and the AMC's.

Actually it was a Mercedes design that was done at the request of Audi, which was then sold to VW (Vanagon), Porsche (924/924 Turbo) and eventually AMC.

Much like the Datsun L-series were based on Mercedes designs they received after the war.

The Iron Duke is a relatively popular swap into a classic Land Rover. Says something about its sporting potential right there!

The old Land Rover 2.25 would be a terrible sports car engine. Luckily, nobody ever thought otherwise. But if you've ever hustled a Series Rover down a twisty road at about 7/10ths, you'll discover that there seems to be some sort of sports car DNA in those critters.

Bobzilla wrote:

Drewsifer wrote: Any chevy small block. Horrible nasty engines. You can do anything you want to em, good luck getting more than 200 hp out of one of those pieces of scrap! Seriously what the heck chevy.

Maybe I'm missing the joke?

Maybe it's another one of this ignoramuses that thinks pushrods are fossils, ancient medieval technology.

Even on that note, I still nominate the IROC Z28 TPI V8. Horrible intake manifold design that struggled to put air into the engine past 4500rpm. That being said, GM made up for that mistake with the LS1, LS2, LS3, LS4, LS6, LS7, LSA, LS9, LQ9, etc. Previous SBC designs before the TPI have lots of potential, the gas crisis of the 70s really killed the HP numbers, but there are ways around that once you free up some air!

The LT1 which has a lot of potential is fatally flawed by the overall design and placement of the opti-spark. Yes, I know there are ways around it, but it's still a PITA.

Anyone for Fords 2v Mod motor? In terms of competing against a SBC? Boosting it is the only economically sound way to match performance to most SBCs.

As far as imports go, the only ones I've ever dealt with are Hondas, and they don't ever have flaws, and are impeccable.

I'm pretty sure Drew is kidding....

Chevette cast iron OHC four....and I like Chevettes!

Maybe someone here can prove me wrong.

Dr. Hess wrote: I dunno what MGB head you're talking about, but I've not seen one that looks like a 22R(E). The 20R is similar but has round intake ports, if I recall. 18RG's are pretty rare and have 2 cams. Is this a MGB BMC engine?

Mmm, we were talking about forklift motors, I thought.

Yes, the second pic is a MGB. Looks like it belongs to my racing bud Alan.

DirtyBird is onto something with the 80's TPI Chevy motors in the Corvette and Camaro. A friend had an '86 IROC with the 200-4R with the 305 TPI and the thing had good torque but kind of wheezed around by 5,000 RPM.

I don't blame the TPI intake alone, the whole package was a matched set really; weak cam, not a lot of compression, lame exhaust, and those long intake runners. He woke the car up a bit with SLP long tube headers (the rest of the exhaust was factory though, so not a huge improvement) and an SLP cam, but it was never that great. Then again, it was an '86 IROC, so the car wasn't that great either... A manual trans, SLP intake runners, and a full exhaust system would have helped a lot.

The first Windsor engine... 221 cid..... it changed when Ford "opened" it up to 260, and 289

The 2.0 Pinto engine had some crappy cam in it from the Factory...., not a bad engine once decent parts were fitted to it

oldeskewltoy wrote: The first Windsor engine... 221 cid..... it changed when Ford "opened" it up to 260, and 289 The 2.0 Pinto engine had some crappy cam in it from the Factory...., not a bad engine once decent parts were fitted to it

Holy crap! Oldskewl! I remember you from Toyotamods and hachi-roku.net back when I had such vehicles.

/threadjack

being a TPI motor owner, and being somewhat fond of the potential i would like to note that IMHO the heads were the weakness in the 350. (the 305 is just hopeless in all areas). the biggest difference in power potential the later generation engines opened up was not so much in the intake manifold design, which was better, but in the vortec head. thus, the biggest problem with making big hp with a tpi is mating the tpi manifold to a vortec head since they do not fit. one company makes a tpi/ vortec capable manifold and motors so equipped can typically make over 400 HP in NA form with other small mods. not bad for a street mannered small block.

Hey, don't forget about the "performance" 2.5 liter Ford V6 in my old contour SVT. That thing was quick, quick to blow up that is. I think I got about 50,000 miles out of mine. Seems like quite a few others on the Contour Enthusiast Group website had the same issue. Seems that ford was playing a pretty funny joke with a crappy oil pan design on that baby. Ha, ha...real funny Ford!

suprf1y wrote:

MrBenjamonkey wrote: My buddy just exploded the motor in his Fiero. Got me thinking. Is there any worse possible sports car motor than the Iron Duke? 90 hp, all iron, 4500 rpm redline, slow to rev, eager to spit out crankshafts.

That motor powered an awful lot of mini stock, and mini mod race cars. Nothing wrong with the Iron duke.

If you got the superduty block, which is rare and expensive. The Iron Duke of Fiero and Citation "fame" can't be pushed beyond 5,000 rpm or about 130 hp before it will splode for sure.

oldsaw wrote:

spitfirebill wrote: Once again I cast my vote for the wunnerful aluminum Vega engine. What a total POS. It disappeared from the face of the earth in a couple of years to be replaced by...the "Iron Duke four".

The Iron Duke was used in Pontiac's IMSA GTU Fieros, running against RX7s, et al:

Yes, the rare, expensive and not production Super Duty iron duke.

http://ironduke7.tripod.com/dukefaq.htm

If I recall from reading in a mag someplace/time, the problem with the iron duke was that the rod manufacturer chucked out rods without any QC at all and had something like a 20% defective rod rate. That meant you were almost guaranteed to have at least one bad rod in the motor. Said rod would part at a most inopportune time and punch a hole in the block, which then leaked oil onto the exhaust manifold, bursting into flames. I'm not a Fiero ("Fire") guy, but isn't that about how it went?

My buddie's Fiero died when he impetuously revved it to a screaming 4,000 rpm at half throttle. The crank decided to destroy the front main bearing at that time.